How to Watch This is Us with a VPN

This is Us is a family comedy about an aging divorced couple and their three grown-up children. The children are triplets but one is an adopted son who was taken in to replace one of the triplets who died at birth. The parents, Jack Pearson and Rebecca Rivas are played by Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore. The three adult children, Randall, Kate, and Kevin are played by Sterling K Brown, Chrissy Metz, and Justin Hartley. The show involves a lot of flashback scenes so all of the cast is doubled by actors playing their younger selves.

Watch This is Us online

As well as broadcasting This is Us over the airwaves, NBC makes all of its programs available in the United States through cable and satellite TV systems. NBC’s website includes a media streamer, which members of the public can watch the channel live or select videos from a catchup library. This is Us is accessible for free at NBC.com.

Visitors to the NBC site can watch all episodes of all seasons of This is Us online for free. However, access to most of the episodes is only available to those who create and log into an account. You can only watch three locked episodes without entering the details of the provider that you normally access NBC through.

None of the videos of This is Us will play on the NBC site if you are located outside of the USA. This is the case with all videos in the NBC catchup library and also for live streaming.

Where else to watch This is Us online

This is Us is not available on Netflix USA. However, it is available on Netflix Canada. All seasons can also be streamed on Hulu. The Hulu system also has the right to show all future seasons of the series as they become available on NBC. As with NBC, Hulu blocks access to its service to anyone who is not inside the United States at the time of viewing. So, even those people who are usually residents in the USA and qualify to set up accounts at NBC and Hulu can’t watch if they travel abroad for work or on vacation.

Sling TV, FuboTV, and YouTube TV also all show This is Us online and they all also have the same location restrictions as NBC and Hulu. It can be pretty annoying if you are paying for one of these streaming services to find that you are blocked just because you are abroad. Those services don’t stop charging you just because you are overseas on vacation for a few weeks, so you end up paying for nothing just because you are traveling.

There is a way around the regional restrictions that all of these US systems impose. With a VPN, you can unblock your streaming service and access This is Us even when you are not in the USA.

Every computer connected to the internet has to have a unique address. This is called an IP address. The IP address isn’t fixed on your computer or mobile device. However, it can be referenced to a location. So, if you go to Paris, France on vacation and then connect to the hotel wifi system on your laptop, the internet service provider for that hotel wifi system will allocate your computer one of its IP addresses. When you access the NBC website, the video server there won’t see that you are an American. All it can tell is that someone in Paris is trying to access one of the videos that are reserved for people in the USA, so it will send you a blocking message instead of the This is Us episode that you selected.

If you sign up for a VPN service, you should turn on the connection to the VPN first. Once that connection is active, all of your internet traffic goes down a secure route (called a tunnel) to the VPN server. Leaving the VPN system on the other side of the connection to NBC, the return address on your requests for videos will have the VPN server’s IP address, not your French IP address. NBC will allow access and send the video stream back to the US-linked IP address. The VPN server automatically forwards all of this code back to your computer and your browser will play the requested This is Us video.

VPN services offer a long list of server locations, so you can break location restrictions imposed on websites in many different countries. You just have to make sure that you choose a server location in the country of the service that you want to access. So, for example, if you wanted to watch videos from the BBC iPlayer, you would select a VPN server located in the UK. To watch This is US on the NBC website, you always need to select a VPN server in the USA.

How to stream This is Us on NBC outside the USA with a VPN

Not all VPNs can perform this location-shifting trick. This is because most streaming services scan for VPN activity and block requests mediated by VPNs. Only the best VPNs are good enough for the task of getting g into NBC from abroad. To save you time and money trying out all of the VPNs on the market, we have produced a list of the best VPNs for NBC.

Best VPNs for This is Us

ExpressVPN

Our top pick!

• Always evades internet control in the PRC
• Keeps ahead of the Netflix VPN detection algorithm
• Benchmark tests show excellent speed

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Surfshark

• Smart DNS service, understands the technology
• Comprehensive security add-on package.
• No data throughput limits and has a no-logs policy

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NordVPN

• More US city locations than its rivals
• Includes malware protection
• No-logs policy

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CyberGhost

• Precise locations
• Very large VPN server network
• Offers a 45-day money-back guarantee

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IPVanish

• No limit on the number of devices you can connect at the same time
• SOCKS5 proxy, which its main rivals don’t have
• More VPN servers in more US cities to dodge blackouts

Check best price IPVanish Review